Evening Lights by Albert Henry Robinson
Albert H. Robinson
Evening Lights
oil on board
titled on the reverse
8.5 x 10.5 ins ( 21.6 x 26.7 cms )
Auction Estimate: $14,000.00 - $18,000.00
Price Realized $16,520.00
Sale date: November 20th 2018
Walter Klinkhoff Gallery, Montreal
Kastel Gallery, Montreal
Private Collection, Toronto
Paul Duval, Canadian Impressionism, Toronto, 1990, page 130
His vision of the harbours and villages of his home is an idyllic one—a portrait in soft focus. In “Evening Lights”, Robinson captures the pale lavender light of dusk as the sun sets on a rural town blanketed in snow. Robinson’s scenes of the Quebec countryside and its inhabitants are characterized by their simplified forms and gentle hues, mixed with generous amounts of white paint and applied with the artist’s characteristic crisp, rectilinear brushstrokes. Rather than capturing the country through depictions of barren terrain, Robinson narrows his focus on the dwellings of emerging towns and cities in the early twentieth century, lending life and narrative to the prevailing landscape painting tradition in Canada.
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Albert Henry Robinson
(1881 - 1956) Canadian Group of Painters, RCA
Albert Henry Robinson (RCA) was born in Hamilton, Ontario in 1881. Robinson studied in Hamilton with John S. Gordon and left for Paris in 1903. He continued his training at the Julian Academy with Bouguereau and Bachet, and then with Ferrier at the L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts. During his time there he travelled to Normandy and Corsica. After returning to Hamilton, John S. Gordon hired him as an assistant and Robinson exhibited his work for the first time in 1906. In 1910 he met and befriended A.Y. Jackson. Between 1918 and 1933 Robinson travelled along the shores of the St. Lawrence and in the Laurentians painting many landscapes, which constitute the bulk of his work.
Robinson was a member of the Pen and Pencil Club of Montreal and the Arts Club of Montreal. He was also elected a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1920, the same year in which he participated as a guest artist at the inaugural exhibition of the Group of Seven in Toronto. He also was a founding member of the Beaver Hall Group in 1920 and the Canadian Group of Painters in 1933.
Robinson's work is in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the Art Gallery of Hamilton; McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, among others.
